Out Now! TAPS BY LESTER SQUARE AND FRIENDS!
As well as Bandcamp, TAPS is available at the following stores:
Acrcloud, Amazon, Anghami, Apple Music, MediaNet, Boomplay, Deezer, Instagram/Facebook, Adaptr, Flo, YouTube Music, Gracenote, iHeartRadio, ClaroMusica, iTunes, Jaxsta, Joox, KKBox, Kuack Media, Mrc, NetEase, Qobuz, Pandora, Saavn, Spotify, Tencent, Tidal, TikTok/Resso/Luna, Soundtrack by Twitch and Yandex Music (beta).
Taps
by Lester Square and Friends
Badly Shaved Vaginas 08:56
The Thing is...There is no Thing 06:03
Pandora's Box 09:04
Stupid Cows (a gig in 1979) 04:42
Wise Old Man 06:31
Just as if 04:55
Killing Rock and Roll 04:21
Barry Manilow? 04:28
School for Fools 05:59
The Space Between the Notes 08:12
About
The English affection for portrait miniatures has a long history: Nicholas Hilliard, John Hoskins and Samuel Cooper to name but a few. In the world of literature, critic Colin Manlove observed “The growing pleasure of English writers in creating fantastic miniature worlds which work on their own.”
It may be that those who live upon a small island take a delight in small things.
In 2022, having tired of a solitude born of Covid 19, Lester Square emerged blinking into the light and laid down a challenge to a number of eminent authors of his acquaintance to provide a short story intriguing enough to elicit full immersion in a pocket otherworld: as William Blake would describe it, seeing “a world in a grain of sand.”
The process couldn’t have been simpler, collaborators merely sent in a sound file of their reading recorded on a phone. The challenge then for Lester was to set them to music and sound collage which complemented and amplified the mood conjured up by the written word. Sometimes literally - the rhythmic headboard banging as the neighbours have sex next door to Andrew Gallix; sometimes through counterintuitive juxtaposition – the jolly counterpoint to a skinhead attack in Lucy O’Brien’s memoire.
The collision and interplay of genres has resulted in 13 evocative vignettes - some magical, some comical, some foreboding - that have become more than the sum of their miniature parts
…but which leave you wanting more.
Credits
released May 30, 2023
Music: Lester Square, guitars and keyboards. All other instruments
Sam Pelling and Cynthia Sizemore,
All authors read their own short stories except for School for Fools read by Bid
Recorded at Liberal Elite Studio, Islington and Premises Studio, Hackney
Engineer, Neil Goody
Published by Cherry Red Songs.